They can’t calculate, for the values at stake are not commensurate – at least they can’t be expressed or compared mathematically, as the idea of proportion suggests. How do we measure the value of a country’s independence against the value of the lives that might be lost in defending it? How do we figure in the value of defeating an aggressive regime (the invasion of Kuwait was not the first, nor was it likely to be the last, of Iraq’s aggressions) or the value of deterring other, similar regimes?
All values of this latter sort are likely to lose out to the body count, since it is only bodies that can be counted. Walzer, who supported the first Gulf War and opposed the second, maintains that the notion of proportionality in warfare has value and truth, but it is a “gross truth” that does not enable us to make useful discrimination in most cases. In recent British political debate, it has in my view had little utility.
For example, in July the Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, argued in the same article that Israel’s intervention in Lebanon was disproportionate and that a protracted conflict would be tragic for the region – when the speediest way to end the conflict was presumably for Israel to win it quickly by using superior force. I realise that not everyone will agree that Israel’s aims were justified, but my point is that proportionality does not precede the issue of the justice of war aims. Our judgement of proportionality depends on an estimate of the justice of a cause and the costs of not taking military action.
Norman clearly has similar premises. He says: “Sometimes there is a justification for opposing tyranny and barbarism whatever the cost. Had I been of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers.
The same impulse was at work in my support for the Iraq war.” But in citing the war against Nazism, on which almost everyone bar the politically naïve and the politically malevolent agrees, he blunts the force of the point. The war against Nazism was a case , for Nazism was barbarism without limit and there can be no serious debate about the consequences had we failed to defeat it.
Moreover, the evil of allowing it to prevail was so great that fighting it was morally required even though in 1940 our defeat seemed certain. (There is a plausible historical counterfactual. Lord Halifax might have succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister and negotiated a deal with Hitler whereby British neutrality was rewarded with our keeping intact the empire.
) The proportionality of means can only be judged properly with reference to the character of the enemy we face and the threat that it poses. In 1940, the evil and the threat were such that even the principle of non-combatant immunity was superseded by the moral requirement to defeat Nazism. Walzer believes obliteration bombing of German cities would have been justified in 1940 and 1941, though not later, on grounds of what he calls supreme emergency (“Emergency Ethics”, in Arguing About War, 2004, p.
Yet supreme emergency is too restrictive a criterion for assessing the justice of warfare. I say this not on ethical grounds but on historical ones. Let me take another example that Walzer cites, in which the military means employed were horrific, and on which I fiercely reject his conclusions: the defeat of Japan in WWII.
Walzer states: “The Japanese case is sufficiently different from the German so that unconditional surrender should never have been asked. Japan’s rulers were engaged in a more ordinary sort of military expansion, and all that was required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown” (Just and Unjust Wars, 1977, pp. The outcome of this principle, if it had been applied by Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman, would have been disastrous: emboldening of the ‘war party’ within the Japanese Cabinet; continuation of Japan’s imperial subjugation of Asia, which was in itself a humanitarian catastrophe; and the likelihood of having to contend with future Japanese expansionist ventures.
We can, even on a shorter timescale, say with a high degree of probability that the strategy of the Allies - including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – caused fewer deaths than any realistic alternative course. One of the most important of Japan’s wartime officials and Emperor Hirohito’s closest adviser, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Marquis Kido Koichi, later assessed that surrender in August 1945 saved “twenty million of my innocent compatriots” (cited in Robert J. Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision, 1995, p.
Those considerations do not resolve ethical argument about the conduct of war (which at Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved our side's violating the principle of non-combatant immunity). But that is the point. Civilian deaths in warfare have immense bearing upon, but do not answer, the question of the justice of any particular war.
We must have regard to historical considerations as well. Underestimating the costs of a pacific policy – as Walzer does in the discussion I’ve cited – can be at least as disastrous as overestimating the benefits of war. Underestimating the costs of failing to topple Saddam Hussein is what we interventionists have consistently identified as the weakness of the anti-war case.
It is a weakness also in the position that Norman now holds. Presumably because our argument involves a counterfactual – what would have happened if the West had pursued containment and deterrence rather than force – it is rarely discussed in public debate (and I do look for it). I stated the point very briefly in a Guardian article on the third anniversary of the war: Mistaken ideas have consequences, even when the inference drawn from them is a counsel of inaction.
Had we not overthrown Saddam, Iraq today would be far from tranquil. Many argue that the absence of WMD shows that western policy had been working. It was in reality unravelling fast, and few opponents of war treated the problem seriously.
Saddam allowed intrusive inspections only because of the threat of force. Containment of his regime would have meant continuous military deployment in neighbouring states and the no-fly zones; intensified economic sanctions; inspections coercive enough to withstand Saddam's intimidation and fraud; and the support of France and Russia. Even with personalities of greater competence than Hans Blix and higher morals than Jacques Chirac, that commitment would have been inconceivable.
Of the permanent members of the security council, only the US and UK could have been relied on. Containment was not working. This matters greatly to the justification of the war, at the time and in hindsight.
The alliance of Leninists and Islamists who make up the misnamed Stop the War Coalition was of course unfazed by the approaching failure of containment, because it saw in those policies evidence of Western imperialist designs. But many critics of the war sincerely wished for the downfall of the Baathist regime and made no excuse for its brutality. Let us leave aside for the moment the question of how that might have been achieved through non-military means, and consider the circumstances in which it would have had to come about.
In an article in The Times this week, the columnist Tim Hames, a supporter of the war, reasoned this way about the outcome: The problem has not been the Bush Administration underestimating how much Iraqis might come to loathe the West for the “occupation” but a failure to grasp the extent to which, thanks to Saddam, Iraqis had come to fear and hate each other. That inter-communal hatred is the present cause of Iraq’s troubles. American soldiers have died in tragic numbers this month not because of any so-called insurgency that wants to drive the US out of Iraq but because they have been attempting to prevent rival religious and sectarian militias from killing their enemies.
The effort to hold together a central government in Baghdad (a drive, ironically, designed to reassure the defeated Sunnis) does not command sufficient consensus to sustain it. This is not quite right. It absolves the Bush administration of blame that it merits.
One of the most illuminating discussions of postwar Coalition strategy I have seen is by a young lawyer, Noah Feldman, who served as Constitutional Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003. He argues, in his book What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (2004, pp. 78-9) that Iraqi associations formed around denominational identity arose after the overthrow of Saddam because the Coalition failed to establish collective security for Iraqis: It would be perfectly correct … to blame the invasion for creating a situation in which a pervasive sense of insecurity quickly descended upon Iraqi life, necessitating in short order the formation of protection associations other than the state.
In that indirect but nonetheless decisive sense, the Coalition, specifically the United States, played a major role in the rapid emergence of denominational identities in the immediate postwar period. The United States did not invent those identities, nor did it intentionally reify them; but it produced an environment in which it was necessary for Iraqis to invent them. Had there been half a million US troops on the ground, it is highly likely that there would have been little looting, no comparable sense of insecurity, and therefore a reduced need for denominational identities to become as dominant as they quickly did.
Tim is wrong to identify “the problem” without reference to US failure to establish order, and to the murderous coalition of Baathists and Islamists lauded by some commentators as the “resistance”. But he is right in one important respect. The bloodshed in Iraq reflects the absence of a functioning state.
That is a terrible indictment of Coalition strategy. But it is also a challenge to those who opposed our intervention, or – as in Norman’s case - retrospectively withhold their support for it. Regime change in Iraq without Western intervention would have ensured the burgeoning of forces of theocratic barbarism and no countervailing authority Some commentators attribute the violence of these groups to the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s declaration of ‘total war’ on Iraq’s Shiites presumably will not disabuse them of that view – but it ought to. In these circumstances, we would have found it a short transition, chronologically and qualitatively, from a rogue state to a failed state, with appalling consequences for Iraqis and for the region. I carefully said that “many” critics of the Iraq War sincerely favoured the downfall of Saddam.
Not all of them did, even outside the totalitarian fringe occupied by the Stop the War Coalition. I mean this not as an insult but as a description of a particular and politically mainstream position regarding Iraq. Some of the most prominent critics of the war, such as Brent Scowcroft, come from the realist school of foreign policy.
They would argue that a strong state, even a grossly oppressive one such as Baathist Iraq, would be preferable to an anarchic non-state. The intervention in Afghanistan would be supported on this view, because it replaced a weak state with at least the prospect of a stronger and constitutional order. But in Iraq we have created a situation in which no one has a monopoly of the means of violence.
This is a severely destabilising influence on the region, and has given an opening to our direct enemies, Islamist fanatics of the type that planned and executed the attacks of 9/11. This is an influential argument, and a superficially plausible one in that everyone can see that Iraq is now on the verge of civil war. It is not a position shared by Norman Geras, and for good reason.
The reason that Norman would certainly cite is the scarcely imaginable human cost of treating a gangster regime such as Saddam’s as a state actor comparable to other states. Notoriously and disastrously, the Reagan administration aided Iraq in the 1980s on this premise as a counterweight to Iran. But there is another reason, which is that a declared policy of realism often has scant grasp of political reality.
One point the much-reviled neoconservatives have correctly identified is the association of Islamist terrorism with the perpetuation of autocratic states in the Middle East. Denied an outlet in politics, dissent emerges in the only part of society open to it: religious fanaticism. Opposing autocratic states – allowing that some are more malign and pose greater risks than others, but opposing them nonetheless – is essential to our security.
In the case of Baathist Iraq there was another important consideration. It was one that the US and British governments comprehensively mishandled: the question of the missing WMDs. Out of appalling intelligence and political ineptitude, the issue has been relegated to a question of the veracity of our political leaders.
It is a lot more important than that. In 2004 Rolf Ekeus, the first chairman of UNSCOM, wrote in , the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an important assessment of a highly influential IISS report on Iraq’s WMD programmes (link requires fee). Ekeus had previously argued that: "My feeling is very clearly that the Iraqi policy long before the war was to build capability to develop its capabilities to produce weapons for the situation, for the conflict situation, not to produce for storage and create a problem of storage management.
" In the IISS article he drew a further inference that gives a different complexion to the issue of WMD from the one usually presented in British political debate: [T]he Iraqi policy, as reported by UNSCOM to the Security Council, [was] that after its WMD arsenals had been destroyed in the mid-1990s, Iraq was not interested in producing biological and chemical weapons for storage. Iraq viewed these weapons as tactical rather than strategic assets – only the latter would have required long-term storage. Instead, Iraq was aiming to keep the capability to start up production immediately, should the need arise.
They can’t calculate, for the values at stake are not commensurate – at least they can’t be expressed or compared mathematically, as the idea of proportion suggests.
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